Witch Girls Adventures – System Mastery 39

Witches! Rustics! Technomancers! The Ugly One! It’s Witch Girls Adventures, and it’s your chance to step into the stylish shoes of a 13-year old witch and go on way cool adventures, maybe even at the mall. Shopping! This game is aimed a little young, so we try to puzzle out what makes a good game for kids while we’re at it.

Editor’s note: Don’t forget to send in questions for the new show, Afterthought. Let us know anything you want us to talk about at systemmastery@gmail.com! Also, is this actually a fetish game? Have we been fooled? A lot of the internet seems to think so.

8 responses to “Witch Girls Adventures – System Mastery 39”

Interesting, especiallly how you mentioned the non-sexualised and empowerment thing. There’s a rolling claim that this game was written by, and for, people with transformation/domination fetishes. Did you find that?

Not really. I mean it’s got a lot of transformation spells in it, but that seems like it’s just in-theme for teenage witches. That’s like 3/4s of what they do in cartoons, with the other quarter given over to delivering wicked burns to each other in malls.

That said, I certainly don’t think it’s impossible, because it is the internet.

WGA is clearly aimed at children, but I don’t think I would ever let an actual child read it. The gleeful, casual cruelty exhibited by the protagonists in the comic sections (which double as examples-of-play) genuinely disturbed me. This is a game where the normal – encouraged, even – response to being mildly inconvenienced is some hellish Old Testament style worse-than-death punishment, and while I do realize all children are bloodthirsty little devils inside and any RPG session run by kids for kids is likely to devolve into a mass murder simulation of some sort, I still don’t think that outright sadism needs to be actively encouraged.

It’s mostly just the one character that does it, though. Which we have discovered is apparently part of the author’s transformation fetish thing. Every other example character uses magic in more of a Sabrina the Teenage Witch fashion than a Tween Murderhobo fashion. It’s like if you just removed anything having to do with Lucinda and her penchant for murder, you’d have a game that I would actually recommend to kids.